Complainist vs. Dr. No

Dr. No starts off great! It's got this super-sweet 60's-style credit sequence with cool circles and squares bouncing around the screen and obvs the James Bond theme is killer as always. This is the part of the movie where you're like, "Nice! Watching this movie was a fantastic decision! I regret it not even the tiniest little bit!"

You will soon change your mind, however, if you keep watching.

the complainist returns! the complainst vs. 007

Update!

I am not yet prepared to read more 50 Shades so I'm afraid you'll have to wait a bit longer for that. The more you read of EL James, the lower your sensitivity gets, so on the advice of my doctor, I am continuing my sabbatical.

BUT I've gotta put something up here for the international spam robots to read. (Editor's note: we presume that most of our traffic is from spam robots. Feel free to prove us wrong by saying hi or whatever.) So the question is this: whither the complainist? 


Not that long ago I thought it would be fun to re-watch all the James Bond flicks, starting at the beginning. And while I knew I'd seen most of them, I also was pretty sure I'd missed a couple here and there, so why not catch up with the full run?

So I started doing it and you know what? James Bond movies are almost exclusively terrible. Sometimes charmingly so, but often not. Often just regular terrible.

Typical crimes of early the early JB:

• These plots? They just ooze in all directions. When I was a kid I thought maybe the stories were just complicated and that's why I didn't always get them. Turns out I still don't really get them. The plot feels like it's being made up in real time. It also just sort of feels like JB launches himself places blindly, but always ends up in the right spot based on dumb luck. 
• I should've put this first: they're even more sexist and racist than I thought they were going to be. I mean, we all know about the sexist tropes like the "Bond girl" but they're weirder and grosser than I recall. And also there's one where JB pretends he's gay so he can catch a villain / sleep with a bunch of ladies. (Editor's note: this is a real thing from a movie! Not a joke!)
• The action early on is super mediocre. You know how contemporary action stars look all actiony? Early JB just looks like somebody's well-dressed dad. He looks like he works at a bank and plays golf on the weekend. As in, I mean you wouldn't call him out of shape, exactly, but you don't see him and say, "Hey that is a man who can punch his way out of a situation." Because that's not how you see him. You see him and say, "Hey, when I'm fifty, maybe I could look like that. That wouldn't be so bad!" Right? That is not the thing I say when I see Daniel Craig. Also note that I said "fifty." Early JB seems decidedly middle aged. JB basically never seems young, per se. He always seems like his best days are behind him.

SEGUE: that is not how the new movies seem. Full disclosure: I really like the Daniel Craig James Bond movies! I think they're super fun! So I'm not coming into this as like, a pure hater who rejects the whole idiom. And probably I should! Probably I should hate the whole lot of them, but I don't. And can't.

That leaves a bit of a reward for me at the end--eventually, if I stay with it, I'll get to movies that I actually enjoy. So very different from 50 Shades where it just keeps getting worse. Over here, it's going to start out prettttttty bad, but I know that better times are ahead. Sort of a reward for myself, right? That's fair!

Also? I remain a little uncomfortable with my weekly lambasting of 50 Shades. On the one hand, it's a weird thing to do in 2014 because nobody gives a shit anymore. Maybe there will be some renewed interest now that there's a movie forthcoming, but I'm pretty late to the party. And, it's kind of unfair to tear into somebody else's entertainment. Because let's be real: of course I don't like it. It isn't for me. Now, I don't think that that means it should get some kind of "pass" from me or that I'm not entitled to an opinion. But JB is just right exactly in my white man wheelhouse. And that means that I never have to feel like maybe I'm being unfair, or maybe I wasn't supposed to like it and that's why I don't like it. Because I am supposed to like it, and sometimes, I do. 

But these early ones? It is amazing to me that the franchise lasted. It is amazing to me that they made more than like, three of these things because they are rough. Just very, very rough. 

So let's talk about that next!

I think I'm going to try to do this monthly. I don't think that anyone would be interested in reading multi-part essays about these flicks so I'm not going to divide them up. Just one entry per movie. And based on my track record, they're probably going to be pretty long entries and not the sort of thing I could crank out promptly. So I'll try to do one a month and maybe figure out some other things to do on some or all of my off weeks, but I don't know what. 

But anyway. James Bond. First? Dr. No. JB has a super-sweet introductory scene, and then it's down hill from there. Wait the parts before JB shows up come off kinda racist, if I'm remembering correctly, and then he shows up and you're like, "Dope. This is going to be tight." And then it's not. Not tight at all. 

Fun, right!

Maybe!

Anyway. Fingers crossed that I finish up with Dr. No in time to post next week. I might! Watch it yourself if you want! Bad news: it's not streaming anywhere in like, a legal sense? But who's going to tell you not to torrent it or whatever? Not this guy! "Srsly don't torrent it tho," said this guy. "Or do," said this other guy. Ugh. Now you won't know who to trust!

Until next week, though! Dr. No. 

50 Shades Shadier: In Conclusion

So, here we are.

First note: I updated my table of contents page, so you might find that an easier way to navigate through these essays if, somehow, you have not read them all. (Editor's note: that's a joke. We know you haven't read them all. We're not judging you. You made a wise choice.)

One time I read a pretty cool trilogy of books, set in the gray north. They were extremely popular a few years ago. The protagonist is an orphan who's been abused sexually and has a cold demeanor and finds it difficult to make relationships with others. She does eventually develop a rapport with a journalist because of course I'm talking about The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and not 50 Shades. 

I bring up those other novels because I want to compare the way they work--or fail to work--as trilogies. In both trilogies, the first novel works as a standalone read. I mean. "Works" is a word I'm using in relative terms here--I just mean that in both cases, when you're done with the first book, you feel like you've read something that is complete by itself. And then, in both trilogies, the second and third books run together so much that the division between the two almost feels arbitrary. It feels a little bit less like three books, but rather one short book and one very long book that's been hacked in half for the convenience of its publisher.

But Lisbeth Salander's continued adventures feel logical. She is, herself, a mysterious figure from the beginning of series, and while the first novel in the trilogy is about an unrelated villain, the second and third books are, in part, devoted to making Salander herself less of a mystery. That is how almost all rewarding plots work: there is a relationship between the external conflict and an internal conflict. The narrator must "defeat" herself in order to defeat some external adversary. And in the most compelling stories, like Star Wars or The Girl Who Played with Fire, the villain is secretly the protagonist's dad.

50 Shades is not the most compelling. It's the least compelling. And so the adversaries that Ana Steele faces have absolutely nothing to do with any inner conflict. Her rogues gallery is as follows:

• Leila, Christian's mentally-ill ex lover.
• Elena, Christian's most jealous ex lover.
• Jack, an asshole from Ana's workplace who's jealous of Christian. 

The pattern is clear, yes? All the villains in this series are Christian's villains. With the exception of Jack, who's just some asshole, the external conflicts are driven by Christian's past mistakes. It's also worth noting, though, that Jack's little coda at the end of book 2 suggests that, even though he tried to blackmail Ana into sexual favors, he considers his real beef to be with Christian. So even this villain is repeating a classic chauvinist move--he doesn't give any credit to Ana. In his mind, he leaps over her and considers her boyf his real enemy. (Although, to his credit, he's not wrong to feel that Christian is the one who really matters, since the book asserts the exact same point at every opportunity.)

There's a compelling story in there somewhere!  Here's my pitch: Christian Grey loses everything in a combination business-disaster / sex scandal, and now he has to find his way in a world he doesn't understand, all while being hounded by women whom he wronged on his way to the top.

That almost sounds like something, right? Almost! But our little story idea points to the main structural failing of 50 Shades: the story doesn't really belong to its narrator. Ana is only the "hero" because she happens to be the character narrating everything for us. Nearly every other character in the entire novel has more agency, more drive, more motivation. Ana gets basically one independent action per novel. In the first book, she tells Christian to go ahead and spank her, so that she can better understand his desires. In the second book, she physically repulses an attack from Jack Hyde.

Besides these two sequences, everything is driven by Christian, not by Ana. Ana is at the center of this book but it's just not really her book. It's Christian's story, as narrated by Ana.

I've read some excitement on the internets about the fact that the forthcoming movie version of this mess is a big-budget movie aimed squarely at women that's directed by a woman and based on a novel by a woman. I won't disagree that that's admirable, particularly at a time when Hollywood seems concerned only with paying boys to make movies for boys starring lots of boys with women thrown in on occasion but only if they have butts that look nice in tight costumes.

But we can do better than this, right? I mean, can't we? Can't we do better than a man's fantasy, narrated by a woman, and then marketed as a woman's fantasy? This is really bumming me out.

But hey! At least I'm done with it for a while! Sort of.

50 Shades things I plan to work on in the near-term:

• Some statistics on a few of my least-favorite of EL's clichés. How many times Ana says "crap," for instance. Or blushes. Or flushes. Or whatever else she does.
• Remember that sex contract? We should catch up on it! There was a sex contract in the first book. It was the main thing about the first book. Here's hint: they've done almost none of the stuff on the sex contract. But you deserve a more complete update.
• Fact: the first book is 150,000 words. I bet a diligent person could cut it down to 50,000 without losing anything that doesn't deserve to be lost. I am nothing if not diligent. 
• I was thinking about writing some alternate-universe fanfic about these characters. Maybe one where one of them is vampire? I dunno. I'm kicking around a lot of ideas.

In other words: don't worry too much. We have a little more to go. 

50 Shades Shadier: Chapter 22

This is it, friends! The end of the line.

Well. The end of one line. So you do have to get off the train here, but there are other trains you can transfer onto but those are different lines. Sorry. Just didn't want my metaphor to sound too dramatic because if you're reading this you probably don't enjoy things that are too dramatic. Again: this is sort of like when you watched The Two Towers and you were like, "Oh man. I can't wait a whole nother year to watch The Return of the King! I really need to watch that third movie to make sure that this trilogy rights itself after the second entry's slight decline in quality!"

(Editor's note: we're talking about the fall-off in blog quality, which we may be able to correct for Book 3. We're assuming that Book 3 itself is even worse.)

Anyway. Before we get to the last chapter--one of the really great things about writing this blog is that everyone I know considers me basically a clearinghouse for everything 50 Shades-related. Cool, right? V. cool. But anyway this is a pretty interesting read courtesy of someone on reddit. The highlighted comment was sent my way and while it doesn't contain any surprises, it did tell me a lot I didn't know about the particulars of Twilight fanfic and how EL used fanfic boards to build up popularity for her terrible book. The commenter also argues, quite persuasively, that EL will never write anything again. I assumed the same, but more because why should she even bother now that she has all the money in the world. The commenter's point is that EL is a product of a fanfic culture in which lots of writers are working through similar ideas simultaneously. Meaning there's nothing to indicate that EL even could sit by herself and write a book without a fanfic community to help generate all the ideas with her.

Glad I'm so clever and original! I never rely on anyone for anything! Oh except for how I rely on the existence of these books as a launching pad for my cheap jokes. But otherwise I'm practically my own island I swear.


Anyway where were we?

50 Shades Shadier: Chapter 21 part 2

tldnr
Ana and Christian eat lunch and then go to Christian's house for his party and learn that Kate is mad at them. 

We're so very close to the end! I mean the end of the first 2/3! That's almost the end of the end tho, right? Getting there!

I'm going to have to figure out something else to do for a while now, because I can't jump into the next book yet. I just can't. So I'm open to suggestions. Optimal scenario: I do a couple of different, ongoing things at the same time. I bet I could start in on the third book more promptly if I weren't only writing about it. Like if I had some kind of palate cleanser, too. That's fair, right? I deserve that. I welcome your suggestions.

Also, what should I do about the first book? Now that the movie is a real thing, There's going to be a lot more discussion RE: all things 50 Shades. Last spring I registered for a one-day seminar about how to find a literary agent and get your book published. I paid money and everything. But then I forgot when it was and didn't receive any follow-up and so I guess I missed it. And that is the true story of how I didn't find out how to get an agent and publish a book. Should I just self-publish an ebook? I mean I might as well, right? What's the worst that could happen--I make zero dollars on it? Get this: I already make zero dollars.

Follow-up question: is anyone interested or should I say "willing" to look at any of the ebook version of my essays on the first book? I did try my best to chop it into something more book-like, but I'm sure there are still plenty of repetitive parts and mistakes. It's also 120,000 words. I know right? I'm the guy who wrote 120,000 words about 50 Shades. Oh and a bunch more about this other book, too. That's how I introduce myself at parties. I mean at party. I don't get invited to many.

But wait where were we?

Our story thus far:

50 Shades Shadier: Chapter 21 part 1

tldnr:
Sex.

Here's a thing that's nice for me, even in the midst of reading this terrible book: It looks to me as though, somehow, there are people even now finding this blog and starting to read this mess from the very beginning. Thanks! Extremely satisfying to see that even this week, some of the most-clicked essays at The Complainist are the first couple chapters of the first book. Thanks! It's almost enough to keep me going straight into the third book with no break! But not enough. I really, really need a break. But I can at least get to the end of these last couple chapters. I know I can probably!

Our story thus far:

Finally! The trailer you've been waiting for!

I watched it, so you don't have to. Watch it if you want to.

Everything looks awfully accurate, which is too bad, but makes sense. The producers took a look at the numbers and saw that a hundred billion people read the book, so they concluded that there was no logical reason to try to make a movie that would speak to anyone besides committed fans. So they made a movie for committed fans.

I do predict that this movie is going to be better than the book, even though the trailer is pretty bland. Why? Well, I'll tell you. The first thing is that we'll be missing one of the book's biggest drawbacks: unbearably dum narration. Not having to be in Ana's head for two hours will make the movie goddamn delightful in comparison to the book. Oh that leads me to the second good thing about the movie: it's probably two hours long, and it took me a lot longer to read the book. So points for the book!

The only thing present in the trailer that's not part of the book is the shot of CG jogging. The book is so, so talky, and so static, so it makes sense to me that the director was desperate to find some moments where people actually move around besides when they're doing sex. The only time anyone ever moves around in the books is during sex, and you can't put all that much sex into an all-audiences trailer. That's also, I expect, the reason the helicopter and the glider are in the trailer. Both suggest people going somewhere and doing a thing, even though careful readers will note that these are both completely pointless elements. I guess they actually go somewhere in the helicopter but the glider? The chapter featuring the glider is the most pointless in the entire book. It's like a rich-people version of playing miniature golf. Twenty pages of CG and Ana playing putt-putt would've made every bit as much sense.

But yeah- the book is made up exclusively of conversations and sex. The trailer is mostly conversations, with some attempt to make things seem dramatic, but I think the trailer makes plain the book's biggest problem: nothing actually happens.

The trailer does have one huge thing going for it, of course, and that's the next-level great new version of Beyonce's "Crazy in Love." Right? I mean, can I buy that single yet? Like, it's legit so good that you can almost enjoy the trailer if you just don't watch it and listen to it instead and try not to listen to any of the voice of people talking. It's so good that if, somehow? The movie just had Beyonce sounding like that playing the whole time? Or whatever. Just that song on loop for two hours? ALL THE OSCARS.

But in real life that's a four-minute song and they probably won't even use all four minutes of it in the actual film. Hence, no matter what you think of this trailer, you must must agree that the actual movie will be garbage in comparison, because it will have lots of non-Beyonce parts, and the non-Beyonce parts are just going to make you angry.

Am I overstating this? Perhaps! I'm probably drunk (Editor's note: he probably is, sure, but not in a legal sense.) and more important, this terrible book just makes me desperate to enjoy things. The book itself makes me miserable, and the trailer itself is just kinda bland, so anything that's actually good is going to look so good in comparison.



I think, though, that the song itself kind of points out some of the problems with the book, which are likely going to translate into problems with the film.

CG says something like "I exercise restraint in all things," which isn't really true. He's not restrained so much as calculating and cold. So I feel like the trailer is kind of trying to suggest a romance where a couple of characters are "crazy in love" OH SHIT LIKE THAT SONG CALLED THAT! but that isn't really what happens. I guess Ana kinda gets swept up in things kinda? But not really. It's more like "sociopath in love" and that's why the only way to make this movie truly accurately would really be to cast Benedict Cumberbatch and for the director to say, "Hey just pretend you're still playing Sherlock and just do whatever he would do if he were rich and liked to spank people."

But really, you know that part in the trailer where they kiss in an elevator or whatever? That's right after CG says the famous line, "Fuck the paperwork." As in, he kisses her without first having her fill out certain bits of paperwork. That's how crazy in love he is: he kisses a lady who wants to kiss him without having her sign any forms first. This is not a story about two people getting swept away in an intense romance. It's the story of a guy who's a real asshole slowly bullying a woman into doing whatever he wants. The director is wise, though, and is trying to play up the parts that suggest "swept away" and downplaying the whole "sociopath" angle just a little bit.

OMG I CANT WAIT TO SEE IT jk.

I should start a kickstarter. "Send me to see 50 Shades so I can blog about it!" I could probably raise twelve bucks, right? Some of you would throw in a quarter, right? I'm sure you would! Sure you would!

Maybe I should just buy the Beyonce single and pretend I'm watching the movie. That'd be cheaper! And also way better.